J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence)
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The title of George Elliott Clarke’s book length poem, J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence), is borrowed from Emile Zola’s 1898 letter “J’Accuse”, published in L’Aurore newspaper; Zola’s intention was to expose the injustice committed against Alfred Dreyfus, a young military officer wrongly convicted of treason and then deported to the infamous Devil’s Island in 1895. L’affaire Dreyfus and L’affaire Clarke share an injustice, one by the legal system, the other by today’s cancel culture, in both cases it is to be found guilty for something one didn’t do. Today’s punishment isn’t exile to Devil’s Island, it is be to be canceled and to have one’s career ruined. This book, then, is a defense and response to an injustice committed against George Elliott Clarke.

What accusations were brought against Clarke? It is that Clarke was friends with someone who had, with another man, beaten to death an Indigenous woman twenty-five years earlier; compounding the crime, the murderer (whose name I will not mention here) served only 3.5 years before being released, he then became anonymous, he changed his name and moved to Mexico. Clarke’s first “crime” for the cancel culture gang is that he knew and corresponded with, and even met, this individual. What Clarke’s accusers ignored is that Clarke knew nothing of this man’s history until he blurted out his confession to Clarke in September 2019, after 14 years of friendship gained under false pretenses.  Yet, simply knowing the ex-con was enough for “digilantes” (Clarke’s coinage) to find Clarke guilty of something egregious. Clarke’s second “crime” concerns a lecture he was asked to give regarding Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls at the University of Regina. Over this, there were zealous attacks on Clarke; one person even doubted that Clarke was part-Indigenous. Read the Tweets that condemn Clarke, some are hateful, including a letter someone wrote to the University of Regina protesting Clarke’s invitation to lecture at the university; a bookstore promised to remove Clarke’s books post haste from its shelves! Cancellation is a synonym for censorship. The protest against Clarke’s presence at the University of Regina was based on misinformation that Clarke was friends with someone who had murdered an Indigenous woman, and that Clarke’s lecture would include poems by this man. Clarke explained that since the proposed lecture had neither been researched nor written, how could he prejudge its content? Later he withdrew from the lecture, to try to avoid any further controversy. Plainly, it was McCarthyite guilt by association, guilt by lies, and ad hominem attacks that were being used to bring down George Elliott Clarke. 

Clarke’s accusers included both biased reporters and the social media audience, people who are quick to anger and quick to assume a holier than thou attitude to opinions that differ from their own. The reporting of the case ignored that Clarke never knew the history of the murderer-turned-poet who wrote to him without introduction, who sent him poems, who befriended him, who talked poetry with him and presented himself as a poet in the Beat tradition, a faux Jack Kerouac/Gregory Corso/Allen Ginsberg kind of poet, someone Clarke met by chance at a Toronto book launch in 2005. In other words, Clarke’s kindness to an aspiring poet whose true history had been kept from him became ammo against him; he was condemned based on guilt by association. Indeed, Clarke writes that he was slandered and canceled for “allegedly caring more about Poetry and or Free Speech/ than I do about the Human Rights Emergency“; he writes, 

To suggest that either Poetry (Rhetoric) or Civil Rights
must be cancelled to assert Solidarity
with any community of righteous Grievance
is to posit a blatant Tyranny.
O! Beware that outright shit:
“Guilty by Association!”

Is it an exaggeration to compare l’affaire Dreyfus with l’affaire Clarke? On the surface, it would seem to be so until one considers the full effect of “Kancel Kulture” (Clarke’s phrase). No Devil’s Island for George Elliott Clarke, but a potential career ending social ostracism and excommunication awaited him. Some of the cancellers even believed that Clarke was as guilty as the murderer; Clarke writes, “… soon a headline billed G.E.C. as “the murderer”—/ swilling the drastic noun—spilling blood on my name. / (The Halifax Examiner / thus also articulated my spectacular Shame.)” For Clarke’s accusers, simply to be accused is to be found guilty and cancelled; indeed, for Clarke’s accusers, simply to disagree with them is reason to be cancelled. 

If the seriousness of cancel culture is still questioned, I suggest reading Jon Ransom’s So You’ve Been Publically Shamed (2015); some of the cases of public shaming, cancellation, discussed in Ransom’s book might begin in a trivial way, a slip of the lip, a joke gone wrong, but events soon escalate to overwhelm the victim. No wonder few people in the public eye make extemporaneous statements, everything must be thought out, a misunderstood or misspoken comment may result in cancellation. The consequences of Clarke’s cancellation were potentially devastating and did, in fact, devastate Clarke’s life as long as they continued. Ransom quotes one of his interviewees:

“The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,” Poe said, “but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It is worldwide forever.”

And it’s not as though George Elliott Clarke is a minor or insignificant poet. Clarke is the author of acclaimed award-winning books including winning the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, he is a recipient of the Order of Canada, a professor at the University of Toronto, the 2017 Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and he has received at least eight honorary doctorate degrees; but his achievements and reputation meant nothing when it came time to attack someone who, the mob believed, transgressed their morality. Any residual goodwill one may think one has disappears in seconds as the cancellation gains momentum; the greater the victim’s achievements, the more zealous are the attacks against the victim.  

Other poets have been censored, cancelled, including an attempted cancellation of George Bowering who, like George Elliott Clarke, is both a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate and a Governor General’s Award winning poet. Bowering’s No One (2018), published by ECW Press, almost didn’t make it past the woke ECW staff who claimed he objectified women and considered it their duty to cancel the book. Here is what Brian Fawcett writes on cancel culture in his essay, “Book Publishing, Bookselling, George Bowering, and the new censorship” (dooneyscafe.com, 22 April 2022);

It’s never been clear exactly what it was about No One that the ECW staff members found objectionable or objectifying.  One of the several problems with what is now being identified as “cancel culture” is that the cancellers appear to feel no obligation to provide detailed explanations of what upsets them and why it is upsetting. The emotions, apparently, are proof by and of themselves, of authenticity: it is true because I feel it is true. Without disputing the authenticity of their emotions, it’s difficult to have a rational conversation about what other social and political issues and values might intercede or countervail, and impossible to scale alternate values or, in some instances, individual and social rights.

But let me praise this book as poetry; George Elliott Clarke’s J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) is the major literary event of the last five years; the poetry is a combination of word play, word associations, vernacular English, double entendre, and always exhibits intelligence and indignation that justice and truth have been made subservient to false morality and mob justice, mob ignorance. Now you know how a person’s reputation can be destroyed or almost destroyed by a politically correct attack, a cancel culture attack, on that person. But George Elliott Clarke survived, as Cinna the Poet didn’t survive his attackers, as breaking the silence is an act of integrity and morality, and Clarke has written this impressive book.

Stephen Morrissey was born in Montreal, Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in English, and won the Peterson Poetry Award while studying at McGill. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets, a group of young poets who organized poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery in Montreal. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963—2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. He is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and The League of Canadian Poets.

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In A Private Mythology, Stephen Morrissey writes poems that are obliquely confessional while delightfully clothed in the subterfuge of metaphor.  The first part includes a series of poems that share the metaphor of a “coat” for guises of the self, and in the second part astrological signs are applied to eons of civilization as they reflect stages in the speaker’s life. In the third part, the poems return more discursively to family and remarriage with his new wife as lover. Here each poem is a at once miscellaneous and a gem while it maintains the feel of the rest of the collection, echoing subjects and motifs from earlier parts in the collection.  Interestingly, the cover design “Chysalis var 2 “created by Ottlie Douglas-Fodor was inspired when that artist attended a launch of one of Morrissey’s chapbooks, and indeed the design is at once apt and playful in its own right.  The figure with a blanket on his back – suggestive of a  mythological icon – works well for this collection, which improvises its own metaphors and accumulating mythologies. Here is a poet who writes simple words using novel figures but in cadences loaded with quiet aural effects that carry their own peculiar power.

In first part, the coat metaphor provides the basis for a series and a powerful start to the collection. From “The poet’s coat” that “gives warmth/ and provides a shadow” (14)  to the speaker’s mother’s mink fur coat that was confined to closets but intended for fun (and that evokes a period of “madness” in the speaker’s life (18), the poet moves to other kinds of “coats,” including my favourite, “The Coat of My Inner Self.” “You are not as tired of this coat / as I am, and yet I wear it/ obsessively,” the speaker begins:

I am well-covered
in the rags of my complexes,
a wraith of the streets and shadows
in a coat that I have worn since birth. (21)

From the Freudian suggestion of “complexes” in these lines, Morrissey mixes seriousness with an iota of the mundane while he goes on to remark how it is“stained hamburgers /and French Fries” and about how “threadbare” the coat and how it “cannot keep out the cold (Ibid.).” There is a self-irony and humour to this poem with its smooth eliding lines that draws the reader right in.

Similarly, I am drawn by the mythopoeic “Visits from Psyche,” with its dramatisation of a dream in psychological terms. Having the trappings of a real girl, Psyche drives a volkswagen through puddles, and when the dreaming speaker complains that the car might stall with the water spray, she throws the keys in his face, and they hit his glasses, blinding him.  Even as the rest of the poem unravels the speaker’s interpretation of the dream for the reader (in perhaps less satisfying terms), we are offered verses with the suggestion of a quip:

and the key to open a lock,
a mystery to which I was blind,
even wearing glasses. (26)

Significantly, the second part of the poem offers images of pain and guilt, of being oppressed and of suffering. From the injured kangaroo in the dream (that must be returned to a backyard containing a bear) to the wounded horse with the reproachful eye that watches the speaker (in the manner of the injured horse in Robert Browning’s “Childe Harolde to a Darke Tower Came”), we are allowed a glimpse into the speaker’s anguish in the complexity of his emotions.

In the second part, Morrissey applies astrological signs to the various eons of civilization as they provide a macro-metaphor for something like the stages of a man’s life. From the beginning “Age of Virgo ( 13,000 to 10,800 B. C.), which is seen as “the time /of silence, of/  the soul’s gestation,” to the “Age of Leo” (1,0800 – 8,640 B. C.), in which the lion “is born in the heart” and “walks at night/ enters dreams (38),” we perhaps see a movement from an uneventful childhood to a period of becoming and passion at adulthood; but while the “Age of Cancer” talks about caves that are both places of gestation and death, the “Age of Gemini” echoes a middle-agedness in the manner of Rip Van Winkle that is hard to mistake and brilliantly concise:

I fell asleep
and woke at middle age,
so many years spent
in deepening sleep
until released (42).

From the pleasing ring of these lines, we move to the “Age of Taurus” in which the Minotaur-like figure acquires power while his hanging genitals appear as “the shadow/of one in the moonlight/ of one/ whose body was a man’s “(43). The poet remarks on our commonality as humans in these terms:“we each/ have one song/ one chorus/repeating/our need for love (Ibid.).” The dramatization of the remaining ages with their intricate iconography moves into the broader arena while the present implies a history on which it is built.

The third section shares the confessional nature of the first section but is written more discursively. Here the speaker has found love in a new marriage, and both the poems “For My Love” and “Anniversary” are lyrical and touching. In the former, the speaker sees a picture of his wife as a young women when he did not know her, and feels that it is infidelity to love a twenty year old (even if it is his own wife when she was younger) since he has fallen in love with her when she was much older. “Anniversary” is a song that bursts forth most spontaneously with the lines breaking into new images, each with metaphysical tenuousness joined by one point of similarity, with every turn of line:

A flock
of birds flying south
move as one mind
or a single wing turning in the air,
caught on the wind, swooping,
then turning over like
a page in a book (69).

Later in the poem, the imagery shifts to include a comparison of their love to “honey/ in the hive,” with the beat of wings now around an implied queen bee like a “bird wing (Ibid.).”

Employing a similar metaphysical-type image of a “thread” for “memory” in “Hanging by a thread” (the last poem in the collection), Morrissey uses the metaphor to suggest the precariousness of family as it is held together by the single thread of memory from a shared past.

And then the thread
breaks making the sound
of grief & disappointment,
oh brother, son, father,
& mother, former families
we said we loved,
and into the darkness
we fall, as though our past
never existed (87).

Most powerfully, the poem closes with clanging, abstract tableau of “oh broken strings,/ twanging instrument,/ banging drums & a bird somewhere/ out there among the damned (Ibid.).

gillian harding-russell is a poet and writer from Saskatchewan. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan, and wrote her dissertation on postmodern Canadian Poetry. For may years she was poetry editor for Event, and was a regular reviewer for Prairie Fire Online Review of Books. She has three poetry books and several chapbooks published.  Poems have recently come out in the anthologies I Found It At The Movies, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson (Guernica, 2014) and Between the Lines, eds. Dwayne Brenna and Lacey Thiessen (University of Saskatchewan Press, 2014). More work is forthcoming in Descant, The Antigonish Review, Fieldstone and Freefall. The long poem “Missions: Then and Now” was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Award, and will be published in The Puritan, Issue 27 (Fall 2014) .

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